Blood Pact: Patch 3.3.3 raid build roundup
![](../../../../../www.blogcdn.com/wow.joystiq.com/media/2010/02/dhlocksinicc.jpg)
It's been a few months since we did a roundup of the raiding builds and how the current game mechanics impact their relative DPS. With the patch 3.3.3 changes becoming public there are a couple of interesting warlock changes that are worth having a closer look at. Back in November with the coming of patch 3.3 we saw destruction lose its crown as "the best by far." Before then it was simply hard to justify any other spec unless you were giving the Demonic Pact buff to the raid, and doing so came at a personal DPS cost, so wasn't very popular.
While we've been raiding Icecrown Citadel affliction and destruction have been pretty even in their competitiveness, with demonology still trailing along behind like a wheezy fat-kid -- you still want him with you cos he has all the sweeties, but he's not one of the cool-gang. Well, times are a-changin', that kid is growing up into a real power-house.
So, first off, let's look at the actual changes that have been put in place since 3.3.
Affliction
- Shadow Embrace: This effect can now stack up to 3 times, up from 2. However, the periodic healing reduction effect has been reduced from 3/6/9/12/15% to 2/4/6/8/10% per application.
- Demonic Pact: The damage bonus granted the warlock by this talent has been increased from 1/2/3/4/5% to 2/4/6/8/10%. The buff granted to a raid or party by this talent remains unchanged.
- Conflagrate: The damage-over-time effect of Conflagrate has been increased to 40% of the spell's total damage, up from 20%.
- Empowered Imp: The pet bonus damage provided by this talent has been increased to 10/20/30%, up from 5/10/15%.
- Improved Shadow Bolt: Damage done by Shadow Bolt increased by 2/4/6/8/10%, up from 1/2/3/4/5%.
At first glance that looked like a buff each for affliction and demonology and three for destruction -- but wait -- destro locks don't use shadow bolts, so that's two buffs for each spec. A veritable coup for even-handed buffage. Not all buffs are equal however and if you look at the top damage performances of warlocks in ICC (I used the World of Logs DPS rankings tool) you will see that affliction is still outperforming the others, if by a small margin.
So now we have patch 3.3.3 coming our way, what is this going to bring us?
Demonology
- Demonic Pact: This effect now has a 45-second duration, up from 12 seconds, and a 20-second internal cooldown.
- Immolate: The damage-over-time component of this spell can now produce critical strikes.
The Demonic Pact change probably doesn't do much for DPS. I think the main reason for it being there is to reduce the amount of combat log data being thrown around. It should have a positive effect on the buff uptime however as a refresh (minion crit) doesn't have to occur within the next 12 seconds but somewhere within the 25 seconds after the 20 second cooldown. Essentially, that should double the chance of any one buff being refreshed. It also means any minion should be about as good at keeping the buff refreshed -- not that you want any other minion for DPS but if you wanted to pop an imp onto the Kinetic Bombs, for example, you can and still have the buff.
Another interesting feature of the cooldown is that more powerful buffs are not going to be over-written by weaker ones for at least twenty seconds. The inverse is also true but I wouldn't be surprised to find people stacking spell power abilities to trigger a more powerful DP buff at key moments (such as during Bloodlust or Heroism). This may be a step too far and almost certainly will be for many, but it's a new feature to the ability and someone will be trying it.
Immolate. Well, a buff to Immolate is a comparative nerf to affliction, isn't it? With affliction being the only spec that doesn't include Immolate in their rotation it certainly is (see affliction 101 for the basic rotation). As I said before, it seems that affliction has the edge in ICC, not by a long way but then this is only one spell change, it's not going to break affliction. Is it?
In order to get some baseline figures I went back to SimulationCraft. I didn't want to go mad with balancing gear to what is being used in ICC right now, or finding BiS gear lists etc, I just wanted to representative figures. So I used the sample tier nine profiles. Obviously the figures I get are going to be heavily impacted by the gear used in these profiles and if you want to see where you compare with your gear then you can simply import your character into SimulationCraft and run it with the default settings (I didn't change any, including Heroic Presence for the alliance guys). I wrote a brief guide to using SC a few weeks ago if you are new to the tool.
So the results: The chart below shows the base results of the simulations in the dark colors, I then made some adjustments to account for the Immolate change (multiplied the number of immolate ticks by the immolate crit rate and then by the average tick damage) -- these are represented by the lighter parts of the bars. As you can see, destruction had the lowest base DPS scores in these tests which matches the World of Logs reports I scanned.
![](../../../../../www.blogcdn.com/wow.joystiq.com/media/2010/02/dh3pt3pt3specdamagechart.jpg)
Affliction
- A1: 55/00/16
- d1: 00/56/15
Demonology seems to be the biggest winner here though. Not only was it looking to pull the same numbers as affliction prior to this change but it now gets a decent bump in damage. Affliction seems to have lost out somewhat and certainly on that chart it looks to be a big loss. Personally I think affliction will continue to be very competitive in Icecrown Citadel. It's high mobility and raid utility make it still very viable and it's also very popular. This means that people are prepared to invest into making the most of the spec. Destruction never really fell out of favour but certainly now I can see those who like to make things go boom feeling a lot better about their numbers again. Also, I didn't make any rotation or glyph changes, which with the Glyph of Immolate, could be significant for destro numbers.
The clear winner in all this seems to be demonology though. I'm a big fan of demonology and while it's never really had its day in the sun we can see that it is becoming really handy on the damage meters. There is still the issue of fights that buff the player and not the minion (demonology falls behind a bit on Blood-Queen Lana'thel for example) but then with one of the strongest caster buffs available and damage that is right up there I can see a lot of people changing to demo in the near future.
![](../../../../../www.blogcdn.com/wow.joystiq.com/media/2009/10/xswipe_srg_mal.jpg.pagespeed.ic.ZgKn29IOI6.jpg)
Filed under: Warlock, Analysis / Opinion, Raiding, (Warlock) Blood Pact
Reader Comments (Page 2 of 2)
KPB Feb 23rd 2010 1:26PM
Demo rotation is pretty straight forward.
Keep Lifetap buff, Immolate and Corruption up on the target. If the target is above 35% spam shadowbolt unless you get a molten core proc, then switch to incinerate. If the target is below 35% and you have decimate up cast soulfire instead with an occasional SB to keep up the debuff if needed.
The tricky parts of demo are the use of meta and getting extra decimate casts. For meta you want to use it as often as you can but trying to sync it with other things like BL is more dps as long as it doesn't cost you an additional use of meta.
For decimate you can proc it off an add and use it to get 10 seconds of soulfires off long before the main target is low enough to proc it. If you've got multiple mobs getting soulfire up on the one mob and keeping it up through all the mobs is great for dps.
KPB Feb 23rd 2010 1:29PM
O yeah I forgot keep CoD up if the mob will live long enough and you don't need to use elements. Also that first post and diagram in that link is Out of date.
iammurlocftw Feb 23rd 2010 6:00PM
Ty, ill make the modifications on my rotation, if there's a like 3 seconds until decimation i save my metamorph for that but otherwise i use on cool down. of course i always use CoA when they won't be alive for a minute longer but other than that some minor tweaks to my rotation should help alot
fromnowear Feb 22nd 2010 9:00PM
Dominic, I just wanted to say I continue to enjoy your articles a lot. They are easily the highlight of the week on WoW.com for me.
One addendum I'd like to add to this article however:
These numbers must also be taken with a grain of salt.
1) The simulations were run with full raid buffs (which not everyone has- especially in 10 mans), and classes like boomkin can provide a lot to warlock dps.
2) As stated, they were run in T9 gear profiles. Since the itemization changes dramatically in T10 gear, the various specs will scale differently as well. Trinkets, the lack of spirit on gear, glyph choices, and the T10 set bonuses in particular have strong effects on this scaling, in addition to simply reaching haste/crit "plateaus". I highly recommend using SC's plotting and scale factor options when running simulations to observe this.
3) Like everyone before me has commented, the graph is misleading, but also only accurate with those gear profiles. Gear changes will also skew the value of the respective buffs, where the gap may widen to more than just a 250 dps difference to a more significant number (albeit the same -percent difference-, I would bet).
Anyways, these are just things to keep in mind while perusing. I still love the theorycrafting articles. Keep'em coming!
*Decimation procs on comment*
/cast Soulfire
Dominic Hobbs Feb 23rd 2010 2:26AM
Absolutely. I can't stress enough the importance of running these simulations with your own gear set, there can be some crazy differences. Also, you hit on the plotting chart - this is an awesome tool and one of my favourite things about SimulationCraft.
I found it very difficult to choose a 'standard model' upon which to base my comparisons and while most serious raiders are gearing up with T10 styled gear I think that T9 gear still has some relevance for many readers. Either way, the intent was to show the differences to each spec more than the comparisons between them - interesting though they are as well.
When it comes down to it, the real results will be in the raids, not in SC or on any chart I produce.
Finally, re the chart: I find it strange that so many should be concerned with it when nobody mentioned it last time. I could highlight in the text but really, the scale should do the job.
http://www.wow.com/2009/11/16/blood-pact-patch-3-3-raid-build-roundup/
oniryuujin Feb 22nd 2010 11:00PM
I think it's a little early to claim shifts, the patch is still on the ptr and can change anytime, immo buff might get tuned down a bit or aff locks might get a bump still ,i'm personally hoping for old school Amplify Curse.
jay Feb 23rd 2010 12:03AM
Thank god the warlock writer here is not as immature as the mage one. Given the quality of his articles (or the lack of it) it's refreshing to see wow.com does here people that don't get off on mocking other classes.
Really appreciate the good work.
Dominic Hobbs Feb 23rd 2010 2:01PM
I'd be interested to know if this comment is being voted down because of his view of the mage column, his view of this column or his view of mage-hate.
Heathee Feb 23rd 2010 3:18AM
Oh geez, I finally got the hang of Affliction and now I gotta learn Demo!?!
It's tough to be a mediocre player striving for greatness these days... :D
Anyhoo, first off, somebody asked early about a Demo rotation. I don't know if it's good, but this guy's advice made me a great Afflock and he just did an article on Demo:
killingemslowly.blogspot.com
Secondly, I keep reading about "theorycrafting" and things like "run it through the spreadsheet" and while these things intimidate me, I wouldn't mind taking a closer look. Only problem is that I can't find any pages that don't assume I know what these spreadsheets are and how to obtain them.
Anyone mind throwing a noob a bone and telling me where I can learn more about these spreadsheets and maybe even acquire them?
Cheers.
Oh and bonus question for me. I was wondering... So glyph of Lifetap gives you this SP buff, which is great. My question is: Does that buff affect DoTs that are already up? Will a DoT that's cast while the buff is up be a better DoT for it's whole duration? How does that work?
Matt Feb 23rd 2010 7:15AM
Yes, as much as possible you want to be casting under the effect of the Life Tap buff. A DoT that was cast without the Life Tap effect will not change for the better if you Life Tap afterward. I keep a Rank One and a top rank Life Tap hot keyed side by side on my action bar so if I just need the buff, not the mana (like at the start of a fight), I can just use Rank One.
Ikarus Feb 23rd 2010 1:19PM
There was this article: http://www.wow.com/2010/02/01/blood-pact-using-simulationcraft-for-gear-selection/
A good place to start on how to use simulationcraft
Utumno Feb 24th 2010 2:03AM
I'm glad things are looking up for demo since it's always been my favorite spec.
Derrek Mar 23rd 2010 11:47AM
Destro ROCKS!